Microsoft is to Netscape as Apple is to Opera?
Remember when Microsoft dominated the landscape and they drove Netscape out of business by bundling IE ever more tightly with Windows? There was a little matter of a governmental antitrust litigation that eventually caused Microsoft to change it’s ways.
Apple is set to dominate the mobile landscape in much the same way, and they’ve come up with a closed ecosystem of hardware, operating system, SDK, app store and restrictive licensing terms. If they reach as dominant a market position as Microsoft did with PCs, you are likely to see the same kind of legal challenges.
An early challenge is coming in the form of the Opera browser, which was submitted to the app store on March 23rd. This browser isn’t based on webkit, so it changes the equation for folks developing mobile web sites targeted to the iPhone and iPad.
If they give Opera flack, then the crisis for Apple might come sooner. If they knuckle under, they might be able to stem the opening tide for a while longer.
[...] say I am mighty impressed with it. It is zippy, fast and intuitive. There was a quite a bit of speculation around whether this would get approved by Apple. I m happy that Apple approved [...]